


sleep to dream

by spookyfoot



Series: desert keith week [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Character Study, Desert Keith Week 2018, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-03
Updated: 2018-07-03
Packaged: 2019-06-01 17:30:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15148226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookyfoot/pseuds/spookyfoot
Summary: He makes a project of forgetting. He pours himself into inconsequential goals. He gives himself over to things that only make a modicum of difference around the shack, turning it into a Shack, like a capital letter gets it one stretch closer to being a home.(The only person Keith’s ever been able to call a home is somewhere orbiting the freezing expanse around Pluto’s moon, lost to everyone other than the stars.)





	sleep to dream

In the desert, the oppressive heat pushes and pushes and pushes on the air until it looks like it’s shimmering. It’s the kind of heat that works its way into the very marrow of your bones, clawing its way to the center to gnaw out the moisture. The desert makes its own home under Keith’s skin.

Despite the heat, Keith still wears the jacket Shiro gave him. 

It’s a different kind of calendar out here. Keith marks time in the way the energy calling to him out in the desert ebbs and flows, in the way that his efforts at pinpointing whatever’s-out-there pile up under the thumbtacks, the way that loss dogs his footsteps like a shadow—like a whisper just out of hearing range.

It’s been a long time since he’s come out here alone. Desert nights are cold, the sun flees for the night and the cold creeps in. There’s no other body to lean against his, to press its warmth against him, to let the heat grow between their skin. 

He marks time in the way the echoes of Shiro fade. The memories still hang around, clinging to him like sticky, waterlogged air. 

Keith swims through, ignoring the friction of the past as it slides again his skin. In the vast emptiness of the desert, he lets his loneliness, his sorrow, expand until it’s stretched thin enough he can pretend it’s not there. 

He makes a project of forgetting. He pours himself into inconsequential goals.  He gives himself over to things that only make a modicum of difference around the shack, turning it into a Shack, like a capital letter gets it one stretch closer to being a home. 

(The only person Keith’s ever been able to call a home is somewhere orbiting the freezing expanse around Pluto’s moon, lost to everyone other than the stars.) 

He spends hours cracking under the sun, freezing under the moon, hammering pieces of the shack back into place. His left thumb is red and bruised from where he’s hit it with a hammer a few too many times. He switches hands, and proceeds to make a mess out of his right thumb too. 

 _At least they match_ , Keith thinks. 

(He keeps working. He doesn’t stop, doesn’t spare himself a moment to thing about the way he doesn’t match with anyone. 

Not anymore.)

The shack takes its capital, the board accumulates scraps of paper, notes to himself and to someone who will never read them.

It’s survival in the barest sense of the word. He keeps gathering, keeps breathing, keeps searching, but it’s a maze of dead ends with no way out and there’s no Shiro to play Ariadne and leave him a trail of thread to guide him to the nearest exit.  Keith adds and adds and adds, burying anything he feels under a pile of things that might just mean  _something._  All he ends up with is a tower of blocks that’s due to fall apart the next time a wind storm rips its way across the plains. 

It falls apart anyways.

It falls apart under the rush of an alien ship piercing the atmosphere; under the press of Keith’s knife cutting through the restraints; under the realization that home for him has always been a person, not a planet.

**Author's Note:**

> +come cry with me about sheith on[tumblr](http://spookyfoot.tumblr.com)


End file.
